The other shoe has dropped for the Catholic Church in the UK: “Catholic agencies given deadline to comply on same-sex adoptions”
Catholic adoption agencies must comply with non-discrimination laws by the end of 2008 or lose all access to public funds, Downing Street said yesterday.
In the interim, faith-based agencies will have a statutory duty to refer applications to adopt from same-sex couples to other agencies. An independent panel of experts will advise the government on how the seven Catholic agencies can cooperate with the laws. It is still possible that the expert panel could find a way for Catholic agencies to be reconfigured with other adoption agencies and so survive, possibly in a consortium, but no concrete details exist at present.
All the mumbo-jumbo and fancy dancing aside, the bottom line now is this: You may not cooperate with evil that good may result. Catholic agencies must not accept public funds under these restrictions. Neither should they refer folks to other agencies. In fact, they should get out of the adoption business until such time as the Church has educated her people who then put pressure on their elected officials to reverse this travesty of social engineering and loss of religious freedom. The so-called “San Francisco” option is itself a travesty as well, because it’s clear that the Catholic Charities officials there have no intention—and never had any intention—of following or accepting Church teaching on the matter of same-sex adoption or even basic sexual morality, for that matter.
The Labor government is calling the British bishops’ bluff. Tony Blair and his cabinet believe that the bishops will bend and acquiesce, compromising their beliefs for some measure of political compromise. Now the ball is in the bishops’ court: Will they stand firm or break?
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